The NPR Politics Podcast - Gun Control Activists Are Training To Run For Office

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Following in the footsteps of Lucy McBath, a Georgia Democrat who won a seat in the House of Representatives after her son was shot and killed, gun control activists across the country are training to run for office at the local, state, and federal level. They face an entrenched political climate that has doomed substantive action on the issue for decades.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, politics correspondent Juana Summers, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Liz Lang from Greenfield, Indiana, and you're listening to the sound of my 20-pound Siamese cat who is demanding his dinner. This podcast was recorded at 2.08 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, December 16th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my cat will have been fed. Okay, here's the show. Wow, so that was a hungry cat and not a baby? For a second, I also thought it was a baby there at the very beginning. 20 pounds, that's like baby-sized.

That's a big baby. That's a big baby. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Juana Somers. I cover politics and racial justice. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. To date this year, more than 42,000 people have died from gun violence in the United States. That's according to a tally by the nonprofit group Gun Violence Archive. Last year, the final tally topped 45,000. That was the highest number in decades. The gun control group Every Town for Gun Safety has launched this new program to train

people who've been personally impacted by the violence to run for political office. And Juana, I know that you have been doing some reporting on what they are doing. But before we get into the details, I do think it's worthwhile to talk a little bit about what gun violence actually looks like here in the United States. I mean, mass shootings obviously get a lot of attention in the news, but they represent actually a tiny slice of the total number of people who die from guns. Yeah, that's right. And I think it's important to just call that out. And especially in a week like this, where a lot of us have been thinking about the ninth anniversary of that horrific shooting at

Sandy Hook Elementary School. These shootings do make headlines, and they should. But the overwhelming majority of deaths by gun violence of people who are hurt by gun violence, those stories, they never make headlines. They happen quite far from the national spotlight. They're happening in communities, urban and small towns. They're happening in communities, urban and small towns, they're happening in people's homes, in their places of work. And many of those we just we frankly never hear about. So wanted to get back to the program that we mentioned at the outset that Everytown has launched. My understanding is it is trying to essentially recruit and train people to run for office. I get that. But what exactly are they doing and how are they attempting

to train folks to do this? Yeah, so first for people who don't know what Everytown is, this is one of the big gun control groups that is backed by the billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who was the former mayor of New York City, who's also run for president. The group put $55 million behind its elections in 2020. And this program is new. It launched earlier this year, and its first class of would-be candidates is going to graduate in January of 2022. And when I talked to Shannon Watts, who's the head of Moms Demand Action and Arm of Everytown, she told me essentially that the goal is to give volunteers who have worked with them on the cause of ending gun violence and reforming the nation's gun laws,

who have been personally impacted, kind of the nuts and bolts of what it looks like to run for office. Many of them may not know, you know, for example, how to start up a campaign, how to know what it takes for that office, how to fundraise if you're thinking about running. So they want to give them that, but they also want to provide them with something else really important. They told me there's a big mentorship component to this program. So it's connecting them with people who have already run for office who can help them out. One person that is mentoring them is Congresswoman Lucy McBath of Georgia. And if you remember, she herself was a Moms Demand Action volunteer. She became an activist after her son Jordan was fatally shot in 2012. If we won, then I was going to do everything in my power in Washington

to elevate this issue in a way that no one in Congress would be able to turn their back on all the countless numbers of people that keep dying in this country every single day. I know why I am there. Juana, how wide is this program? How many people did you see kind of go through this effort from Everytown? Yeah, so that's a great question. There are more than 100 people who are participating in the program this year. Some of them are running for office already. Some of them are thinking about it. And some of them are people who want to work on campaigns or who want to one day work on campaigns. So why don't you mention that there's over 100 people in this

training program? You know, I would imagine that running for Congress and understanding how to do that at a national level is extremely, is extremely tough and complicated. So are they really focused on federal races? Or is this more about state and local races? You know, they're looking up and down the board here. There's not one specific office they're targeting. Some of the candidates who are participating in this program that I talked to are not running for Congress. In fact, one of the candidates that I spoke to is a woman named Mia Levis Porter, who is running for an assembly seat in the Los Angeles area in California. And it wasn't until actually three years ago that I started sharing my story. And once I did, and I saw the power of how it could inspire others to come forward and share their experiences and build a community of survivors and how it had legislative power. It could move our

electeds to take action. So one of the things that Levis Porter told me when we talked about this program is that she appreciated having a community of other people who are impacted by gun violence. She herself is a survivor of gun violence. Her brother died by suicide with a gun after battling mental health issues for some time. And she said there was power in having people who were vocalizing the same experience that she had had and who were channeling that into some sort of civic duty. You know, hearing what you're describing, Juana, it feels a little bit to me like deja vu, right? I've covered the 2018 midterms, and I remember doing some reporting

at that time that found that gun control was a really big motivating force on the Democratic side. It become more and more of an issue for suburban women. And it was the first election cycle, I believe, to my knowledge, at least in any recent history, where gun control groups outspent gun rights groups. Right. Meaning groups like the NRA. And that was really unusual. And it felt like in that moment, Democrats were really excited about the potential of making some changes in Congress, new laws, and then none of that happened. And Domenico, I don't know what you think. I know you followed a lot of races, but it does feel like the pendulum shifted, I recall hearing in 2018. But yet now what Juan is describing feels like folks are just trying to move that a little bit further, the conversation.

But nothing really substantively seemed to have changed after 2018. Well, yeah. I mean you got to look at the levers of power and who's in control of those things, especially 2018. Democrats took over the House. But you need 60 votes in the Senate to be able to pass meaningful legislation. You know, if you're thinking about whether Democrats, well, hey, they control the Senate right now, why can't they get things done? Like, you know, passing gun restrictions, or passing a voting rights bill, or any other

number of things. Remember, if Democrats are going to go with just 50 votes, with the vice president breaking a tie, they're going to need to sell the Senate parliamentarian on all of these things being related to the budget. So it's much easier to get things done and qualified that are related to money, related to the things that the government spends money on, as opposed to social issue things, which are much more difficult to create this kind of change without getting rid of the filibuster. All right, well, let's take a quick break and we'll have more in just a second. Support for NPR and the following message come from ExxonMobil. As part of its ongoing commitment

to help address climate change, ExxonMobil is increasing the efficiency of its operations and advancing low-carbon technologies that can be deployed at scale. With that and more, it expects to reduce its absolute upstream greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 30% by 2025. Learn more at ExxonMobil.com slash solutions. And we're back. And one question I have about congressional legislation. You know, we've been saying that it's just really difficult for Democrats to pass any legislation, given the numbers they have in Congress. But I guess beyond whether or not they can pass anything, what kind of legislation do folks want to stem gun violence?

Are there kind of common themes that you've been hearing from any of the people going through this training program? Yeah, that's such a great question. It's a question that I put to both people involved with the training program and other candidates that I talk to. You know, I asked them, what does Washington get wrong about these issues? And all of them kind of said that the current federal conversation around gun violence sort of misses the point. It talks about it in kind of an old way. And one of them kind of said that the current federal conversation around gun violence sort of misses the point. It talks about it in kind of an old way. And one of the candidates I had a conversation about this with is Keena Collins.

She is making a progressive challenge to Illinois Congressman Danny Davis. It's a district that includes part of the city of Chicago where she's been a gun violence prevention advocate for some time now. And she told me that the entire reason that she is running for Congress, as opposed to some other office, is because this conversation needs an intersectional lens. I'm running because if we're talking about the gun violence prevention movement, it needs to be victim-centered, survivor-led, and offender-sensitive. And some people say, well, what does offender-sensitive mean? That means that in places like Chicago, where we experience everyday gun violence, the shooters live right next door to the victims. And so my whole job is to make sure that I'm bringing an intersectional approach to the conversation. It's a strike at the root causes of these issues, which are poverty and a lot of other issues that lead to everyday gun violence and

lack of access to health care. And one thing that really stuck with me that Collins told me in our conversation, she told me the story about a murder that she witnessed when she was quite young, where she knew both the victim and the shooter. And what she said to me about that shooting was, and I'm paraphrasing her here, is that the bullet was flying before anyone ever pulled the trigger in that killing. And she said the bullets are things like when public schools are shut down in neighborhoods, when there's lead in drinking water, when people are living in a food desert and they're not making enough money to get by and feed their families. She said those things are all contributing factors. So just talking about things like background checks and banning assault weapons, that's simply not enough to her mind.

And that's one of the things that has mobilized her to run. I think it's a really not they're in favor of gun restrictions right after, you know, one of these events, but then sort of reduce their their likelihood to be in favor of those things after but for a lot of people in different communities, this is a daily occurrence. And, you know, just looking at some of the research on this, some of the survey research, the Pew Research Center did a survey earlier this year back in September where they asked people about how big a problem guns are. Forty-eight percent of people said that gun violence is a very big problem, but there were huge divides along race and place. So when I say that, I mean 82 percent of African-Americans said that it's a very big problem when only 39% of whites did. And when you look at place, two-thirds of people who live in urban environments say that gun violence is a very big problem when just a third of people who live in rural areas do.

I have one last question. I don't know if you know the answer to it. So maybe I'll just throw it out here. Yeah. You know, we were mentioning, you know, I was mentioning that during the 2018 election cycle, gun control groups outspent the gun rights groups, groups like the National Rifle Association, and that that was pretty unusual. Do you have a sense of where the money is at at all this cycle? I know it's quite early in the campaign cycle, but just, I mean, it's going to be a tough cycle for some of these left-leaning candidates to run, and the congressional map just isn't great for them to share. Yeah, I think that's right. The congressional map isn't great for them, but I don't have a

sense of what the money looks like now. I mean, these groups are saying that they plan to field more candidates and spend more money towards making sure their candidates are elected. And one of the things that Shannon Watts at Moms Demand Action told me is the reason why this is so important is because there have been candidates sitting in these seats for so long that have continued to look at this issue that is quite deadly, and they've refused to do anything that has changed the outcomes for so many people in this country. So it's spending that I'm going to be watching really closely as we continue to report. Yeah. And for as many issues as the NRA has had, they've spent more than $4 million this cycle already. So, you know, I think that this is going to continue to be an issue that we see over and

over again. And, you know, I do think, though, we need to understand here and remember that, you know, not only is the right to bear arms in the Constitution and that that's made it difficult for pro-gun restrictions groups to get more of these restrictions to be upheld in courts, especially with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court now, but that same Pew Research Center poll that I cited said that four in 10 people say they live in a household with a gun. I think what we need to understand is that guns really are a singular cultural issue for a lot of voters in this country. It's really an emblem of where they stand culturally. And it's one of those logo items, you know, you think about abortion, guns, religion, these are the kinds of issues that the Republican Party, that conservatives have really built a cultural, you know, slogan around.

All right, well, let us leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics and racial justice. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.